Sidney hears the door before he sees him. The heavy wood opening and closing, the shift in the air, the way the fire in the grate flickers once and then burns brighter, as though the house itself is responding to its owner’s presence. Sidney is on the couch with his knees drawn up, one of Penny’s coloring books in his lap because he’d started coloring absently and then gotten invested in staying inside the lines. He looks up and Erath is in the doorway, in his leather jacket with the hood up, and his eyes are dark and his expression is complicated and Sidney’s stomachdoes something that is not appropriate for a man holding a coloring book.
The pull surges. It surges the way it had when Erath’s mouth touched his palm, a single bright flare of warmth that radiates from his sternum and makes his breath catch. It says: here. It says: he’s here. And the force of it is startling because it’s been quiet all day, a background hum, and now it’s loud and insistent and pointing directly at the man standing in the doorway and Sidney realizes, with a certainty that goes all the way through him, that the pull responds to Erath. Not to proximity. Not to the underworld. To Erath. When he’s close, the pull ignites, and when he’s gone, it waits.
Erath pushes his hood down. His hair is dark and slightly damp, which means it’s raining above, and he looks tired in the way that immortal beings look tired, not physically but somewhere deeper, like they're carrying the weight of the world. He looks at Sidney on the couch in his clothes with a coloring book in his lap and the corners of his mouth do something very small and very private.
“She’s asleep,” Sidney says, because it’s the first thing Erath will want to know.
“I know.” Erath shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the hook by the door, where it joins its identical siblings. “I can feel her.”
“That must be nice. I had to check manually, by walking down the hall and looking at her.”
Erath’s mouth twitches. He crosses to the armchair by the fire and sits, and the distance he chooses is deliberate. Sidney notices. The armchair is across the room. It’s as far from the couch as you can get while remaining in the same room, and Erath has chosen it on purpose, the way he’s been choosing distances on purpose since the kitchen, always giving Sidney more space than he needs rather than less.
“You can sit over here,” Sidney says. “The couch isn’t going to bite you.”
Erath looks at him. “Are you sure?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”
Erath rises from the armchair and crosses to the couch and sits. Not close. Not on the other end either. The middle distance, close enough that Sidney could reach out and touch him if he wanted, far enough that there’s air between them. Sidney appreciates the calibration even as he recognizes it for what it is, and the recognition does something warm and complicated to his chest.
Erath is quiet for a long moment, looking at the fire, and says, “Will you stay for a while? In the underworld. So she can be here until the Coven is dealt with.”
“Of course I’ll stay.” Sidney sets the coloring book on the table. “But you owe me an explanation. You said irrevocably linked this morning and then immediately left to go do god things without elaborating, and I’ve been sitting here all day trying to figure out if that means what I think it means.”
Erath exhales through his nose. He rests his elbows on his knees and looks at his hands, which are large and idle and carefully still. “What do you think it means?”
“I think your five-year-old daughter has functionally married me to you because I let her paint my toenails, and I’d like confirmation that I’m either right or having a psychotic break.”
The corner of Erath’s mouth lifts. Just barely. “Married is a strong word.”
“You said your wife was the last person who could do what I’m doing. You used the word wife. I think married is exactly the right word and you need to start talking.”
Erath talks. He tells Sidney about Angelica, his ex-wife, who is part of the Hargrove Coven. How they could only see each other for the short stretches Erath could spend in Haven. How Penny’sbirth changed the equation, because Penny could traverse both worlds as long as she was linked to one of them, and by linking to one of them she linked to all three. The triangle. The three-pointed bond. The ability to exist in either the underworld or the above for as long as they wanted, as long as they were together.
“You left today, though,” Sidney says. “You were above for hours. How was I able to stay here if we weren’t together?”
“You’re thinking of together in terms of being in the same place.” Erath turns his head to look at him. “But you have to imagine together the way a child would. Together doesn’t mean in the same room. Together means a family, no matter where we are.”
Sidney is quiet after that. He stares at the fire and processes, or attempts to process, the magnitude of what Erath is telling him. A five-year-old child has rebuilt the foundational structure of her father’s existence around a stranger she met in a bar because he gave her chocolate milk and markers and sat on the floor to be at her level. Because he tucked his hair behind his ear and put his hands in his lap and didn’t talk to her like she was a problem to be solved. Because he painted his toenails pink and ate golden Oreos with her on his couch and carried her the last block when her feet got tired.
She decided he was family. And her power, which doesn’t negotiate and doesn’t consult and operates on a logic that makes no sense to anyone over the age of six, made it real.
“Is that why you could heal my hand this morning?” he asks.
“I can heal you because you’re linked to me,” Erath says. “I didn't know if it would be possible before, but since you're standing in the underworld, it seems the connection is established.”
“And the…you really have to use your mouth?” Sidney gives him a look, flushing slightly.
Erath's mouth does curve into a smile then. “Your mother never kissed your scratches when you were a kid? Made them all better?”
“You can't be serious.”
“I didn't create the power. It came to me when Penny was born. She bumped her head crawling under a table, I kissed it, and it healed. Then I discovered I could heal Angelica.”
Sidney looks at him. He looks at the line of Erath’s jaw and the dark fall of his hair and the hands resting on his knees, still and careful and visible. He thinks about the bruise that is still very much present on his own face, the purple and black that Penny had touched with her small fingers and said daddy can fix it. He thinks about his ribs, which are cracked and aching and held together with linen and stubbornness. He thinks about the burn on his palm that is no longer there because Erath’s mouth erased it this morning, brief and warm and over before Sidney could process it.
“Okay, if it works for me too, then why haven’t you healed the rest of me?” Sidney asks. “You healed my hand. My face is still a mess. My ribs are still cracked. I’ve been walking around in your house for two days scaring a child. Why leave the rest?”
